By Harry McCracken | Wednesday, July 16, 2008 at 11:15 am
Large companies don’t always seem to think they’re required to actually deliver the services they promise in order to get their money. (I still remember the time years ago when a rep at Pacific Bell–now AT&T–told me that it expected me to pay my full bill for a week-long period when I had no phone service whatsoever.)
So it’s nice to see the news that Apple is proactively giving everybody who signed up for its MobileMe service or was an existing .Mac user an extra thirty days of service by way of apology for the service’s erratic availability after its launch last week. Gizmodo has the text of an email in which the company admits the rollout was “a lot rockier than we had hoped” and had “lots of problems.” That’s serious crow-eating by any standard.
The company also said it’s going to stop referring to MobileMe’s data-synching as involving “push” for now, since it can currently take up to 15 minutes for e-mail and other info to travel from a Mac or PC to the Web or an iPhone.
(Incidentally, I have a MobileMe account and qualify for the extension, but haven’t received this e-mail yet; why, I’m not sure.)
MobileMe costs $99 a year, so the extra thirty days are worth around $8.25–not a huge whoop, but still nice.
I’m still playing around with MobileMe and forming a firm opinion–it’s a good idea for sure, and an ambitious one, but I wanna get a better sense of just how well it works and if the initial hiccups are over.
[…] Serious problems with MobileMe, however, persist–prompting a subscription extension from Apple, a blog about the glitches and Apple’s response to them, and a widely-published internal memo […]
July 21st, 2008 at 7:00 pm
I made a video that expresses what alot of mac users are going through:
http://joesummerhays.wordpress.com/2008/07/21/my-ode-to-apples-mobileme-failure/